


Say It With Bullets

by messageredacted



Category: Homestuck
Genre: F/F, IN SPACE!, Quadrant Vacillation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-26
Updated: 2012-12-26
Packaged: 2017-11-22 13:22:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/610275
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/messageredacted/pseuds/messageredacted
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Scourge Sisters are bounty hunters who always catch their troll. Together, they're unstoppable. If only they could stand each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Say It With Bullets

**Author's Note:**

  * For [protectrix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/protectrix/gifts).



The market is lit by rows of paper lanterns the color of plums that dance in the brisk wind. The fat lime moon sits low on the horizon, giving everything long shadows. Hot steam whips off the top of Vriska’s bowl of soup. She’s sitting cross-legged on the stool at the counter, her rifle strapped to her back, hunched over the bowl to snatch the last warmth from it. Steam has condensed in her eyelashes in a row of glittering drops.

“You’ll get dysentery,” you say, leaning on your cane and relishing the thought. “I bet they get their water right at the water pump at the camp!”

You say it quietly enough that the proprietor can’t hear you. Vriska snorts and gulps down a spoonful of the soup. You can smell it on the wind, hot and peppery and full of little rings of squid that make you shudder. It makes you think of the horrorterror shoals out beyond the asteroid belt, where the void of space is dense and dark with velvety black horror.

The market is crowded with trolls buying and selling. The kiosk next to you is selling deep fried wasps in greasy paper baskets. Someone has knocked over the shaker full of powdered sugar, and when you inhale, the sweetness settles on the back of your tongue.

“Take a load off,” Vriska says. “It might be ages before she shows up.”

“Constant vigilance,” you say, sniffing the air. There are so many trolls here! A lot of them wear the bright lime and raspberry fabrics that are fashionable among mid-blood tourists. The locals wear chocolatey brown and licorice black. Here and there, some shady characters in sharkskin flight suits with lots of unfriendly weapons go sauntering past, laughing loud at each other’s jokes.

Vriska likes the sharkskin flight suits as well. Hers has cerulean panels on the flanks that are tight enough to show off every sit-up she’s ever done. Your suit is crimson and teal. Some people think bounty hunters such as yourself would be wise to dress subtly, but you’re the Scourge Sisters! You send terror into the bloodpusher of every bond jumper in the galaxy. The sight of your jaunty crimson glasses alone can make hardened criminals shrivel into raisins.

Or at least, it used to.

Vriska slurps the last tentacle from her bowl and unfolds herself from the stool. “Maybe you should take that stick out of your ass, Pyrope.” She shrugs her rifle up higher on her back, settling its weight, and then slaps you on the shoulder. “Go on then, bloodhound, put that nose to good use.”

You stride off into the press of trolls without answering. Vriska Serket is the most frustrating and infuriating troll you have ever met in your life. Sometimes you want to unsheathe your sword and cut that smirk off her face. Sometimes you want to make out with her afterward. And sometimes you just want to pap her across the face and tell her to sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up. All these warring ashen-black-pale emotions make you even more annoyed! That wasn’t quadrant vacillation; it was a quadrant epileptic seizure.

Which is why, one sweep ago, you told each other to fuck off, and you both went your separate ways. And which is also why, last week, after a sweep of truly middling success, you sucked it up and went crawling back. It turns out that the Scourge Sisters are far greater than the sum of their parts, and if you have to put up with Vriska in order to be the best troll you can be, you’ll do it.

But you won’t like it.

You move through the crowds, studying every troll you pass. Since this is an intergalactic spaceport, there are a lot of trolls here from hundreds of different worlds. The air is heady with scents—stewed meowbeastfish in brine; pan-fried fetal oinkbeasts stuffed with hot peppers; a scent merchant with a hundred bottles of pheromones and aphrodisiacs; a leather broker with his wares hanging off a screen. You pull your palmhusk out of your pocket and call up the wanted poster, then give the screen a good lick to refresh your memory.

Your target is a troll named Merena Baredi. She’s the leader of a gang of space pirates with quite a few kills to their name. Though all of the pirates in her crew have some price on their heads, Merena herself is worth nearly two million caegars. Alive, of course, so the Condesce can have the pleasure of executing Merena herself.

Vriska falls into step next to you, although walking side by side takes a lot of shoulder-checking and intimidation in this crowd. Vriska is more than capable.

“Remember when we went after that blueblood with the one point five bounty?” she says, pulling on her gloves. “We were in a market like this. You shot up that orange cart.”

“You shot two bystanders,” you say. “We spent half the bounty paying for damages.”

She grins. “Yeah,” she says wistfully.

A familiar smell catches your sniffnode. It smells like bounty. You turn your head and see her, Merena, leaning over a cart full of oranges. Vriska follows your nose, so to speak.

“We need to take her alive,” you say. “She’s not worth as much to us dead.”

“Please,” Vriska says. “I’m not the one who forgot how to do her job once she went solo.”

“You couldn’t forget what you didn’t know!” You lick the wanted poster one more time and then draw your pistol.

You cut to the left, toward a kiosk selling horn jewelry. The table is covered with plaster mannequins wearing beaten brass horn cuffs and glued-on rhinestones. Vriska disappears in the other direction, circling around to the other side of Merena. Your target herself is pawing through the oranges. You can smell the sharp static electricity smell of the weapon at her hip. She glances over her shoulder once, into the crowd, then gets distracted by something the vendor says.

How it usually works is this: you will approach the target and order her to surrender. When she tries to run, Vriska will be waiting, gun in hand. That’s how it happens about eighty-five percent of the time. Ten percent of the time they just collapse to the ground and start weeping. The other five percent is where things get weird.

Merena hasn’t noticed you. You move from the jewelry stand to the orange stand and equip your canekind abstratus. The vendor spots you and his eyes go wide.

“Freeze!” you crow, kicking over a box of oranges for emphasis and holding your cane sword at the ready. Merena whips around toward you, her hand already going to her gun. “Merena Baredi,” you continue, “you are under arrest!”

Merena flings herself at you. You hop backwards, startled, and crash into someone in the crowd. Merena collides with you and the two of you topple to the ground in a heap. Your sword is not the best weapon for a close-quarters mêlée, so you drop it and wrestle her for the gun, which she has clawed out of the holster at her hip.

The orange vendor is shouting angrily, possibly because of that box of oranges you kicked over, and the crowd is drawing back to give you some room to fight. Merena’s gun discharges, digging a furrow of hot asphalt. You punch her in the face, although you are not very skilled in fistkind. She spits in your eyes, and you knee her in the bone bulge. The move deals more damage to your knee than to her bulge. She grunts and rolls off you.

You grab your sword again and start to get to your knees, then wince. Merena bounces up to her feet and grabs the collar of your flight suit. She hauls you up to your feet, staying behind you. You reverse your grip in your sword and attempt to saw off the flank of her flight suit. She presses her laser pistol to your temple.

“Drop it,” she snarls.

You open your hand and drop the sword. You’re both breathing hard, and now that you’re not rolling on the ground, you can see that Vriska is in front of you both, her own gun drawn and her eyes narrowed.

“I’m heading back to my ship,” Merena says to Vriska. “If you so much as twitch, I’m blowing her head off.”

“Let go of the troll or I’ll shoot through you both,” Vriska says.

The troll! You bristle. Vriska completely ignores you. They both do, in fact, as if you’re just the unnamed hostage in an action movie.

“Ha!” says Merena. “You wouldn’t shoot your—”

Vriska pulls the trigger. The laser doesn’t hit you with any physical force, but the hot blaze of sheer pain comes fast. One caegar-sized hole has been punched through your shoulder, straight as a pin, and into Merena’s arm. You both shriek, although possibly for different reasons.

Merena jerks back. You yank yourself out of her grip, dropping to pick up your sword, although the pain in your shoulder is so bad that you can’t get up again once you’re down there. Vriska fires again, and it goes through Merena’s foot. She crumples to the ground next to you, howling.  


* * *

  
The ship hums gently when it’s on autopilot. Your arm throbs, but the healing foam is doing its work, buzzing and sizzling inside the wound. It smells like hot sand, and leaves a metallic taste in the back of your mouth.

You sit in the galley, with a nutrition plateau full of congealing protein paste in front of you. The healing foam always leaves you ravenously hungry, but the hunger leaves just as quickly as it comes, and now you can’t stomach the thought of finishing the rest of your meal. You might be sick, and the thing about protein paste is that it looks the same coming back up as it did when it was going down.

The galley is small. From your seat on the stool, which has been bolted to one wall, you can straighten your legs and touch your toes to the opposite wall, where the zero-g sink and cabinets are. The only time you and Vriska can be in here together is when you’re on the best of terms, and that’s rare enough. Right now, you’re as far from her as you can be on this tiny ship, and it’s still not far enough.

It’s not because she shot you. Well, it is, but you’re not butthurt over the pain or even the embarrassment. This isn’t your first wild hoofbeast riding contest. Your problem is that you’ve only been working together for a week, and you both had promised to act as professionally as possible to avoid that whole trainwreck of a situation you were in last sweep. And then she shot you. If that’s not black flirtation, you don’t know what is!

You prod at the wound in your shoulder. It feels rubbery, which means it’s nearly healed. Your flight suit is unzipped and folded down to your waist, leaving you in just your teal tank top, which is crusted with your blood. You’ll have to patch the hole until you can get it professionally mended. Your darning skills are fine in a pinch, but you wouldn’t trust them against the vacuum of space. Once you drop off Merena, you’ll get a chance to have it fixed.

Somewhere in the aft of the ship, music starts playing, low at first and then louder. Vriska’s favorite electro-metal death-pop. She told you once that she hates silence on the ship because it makes the time go so slowly. You think the real reason is that it reminds her of the press of the void on the other side of the walls. Whatever the reason, you’ve made a point of turning off her music every chance you get.

Which might be a little black, now that you think of it? Maybe you should stop. But only if she does too. And if you know Vriska, she won’t let this go if she thinks you’re brooding over it. You need to give her a reason to stop.

The last of the tingling in your shoulder burns away. You rub at it and feel nothing but the faintest twinge of pain. That’ll go away. You get up, dumping your nutrition plateau in the plateau exfoliator, and head for the source of the sound.

Your ship—the 4DJUD1C8OR—is small enough that crossing it is a matter of half a minute. By the time you squeeze out of the galley and ascend past the two respite blocks to the weapons cabinet and the cockpit, the first song is only just finishing. Vriska is lounging in the pilot seat, her feet up on the dashboard.

“Done sulking?” she says as soon as you appear. You slap your hand down on the button to mute all sounds coming from the computer. Vriska’s murder-pop stops mid scream. Vriska’s lip curls.

You fold your arms over your chest. “We have to talk,” you say.

Vriska shrugs. “About what? You want me to apologize or something? Geez, Pyrope, I’m so sorry. It’s not like I kept her from shooting you in the head or anything, and caught our bounty at the same time.”

“She wouldn’t have shot me in the head! I was her shield,” you say. “If she’d shot me, she couldn’t use me as a shield anymore. She would have kept me alive long enough to escape, and that was plenty of time to come up with a better plan!”

“I came up with a plan. I carried it out.” Vriska reclines even further in his chair, every inch of that incline meticulously calculated to show you just how much she doesn’t care. “You barely even have a scar.”

“Is this how you made it through the last sweep without me? By carrying out half-assed plans?”

“I’m surprised you made it through the sweep at all, after that humiliating show.”

You hate her from her asymmetrical horns to her clunky shit-kicking boots.

“I should have known you wouldn’t be able to stop throwing yourself at me,” you say. “Why did I even bother letting you come back?”

Her eyebrows shoot up. “Throwing myself at you? You think I was flirting?” She bursts out laughing. “Pyrope, you were just in the way.”

If you didn’t know her so well, you’d think she might be telling the truth, but you can read that measuring look in her eyes. This is a dance, and it’s such a tiring one. Are you black for her, or do you just hate her? You don’t know! This is why you left in the first place!

“We agreed to try to make this work,” you say. “I can’t work with you if you won’t work with me!”

“Who said I’m not working with you?” She lets her chair come upright again. “I’m just doing what we always did, and you’re pitching a fit.”

“Because what we always did _didn’t work_!” you exclaim.

“Why not?” She flings her arms wide. “Why the fuck not, Terezi. Enlighten me.”

That’s when the loud clank of the airlock cycling catches your attention. You whirl around. The computer is flashing PROXIMITY ALERT in big red letters, but of course you’d silenced the alarms when you silenced Vriska’s music.

Vriska curses and hurtles off the chair, going for the weapons cabinet. Laser pistols on a ship are the worst idea imaginable, but you have some good old bullet-shooting guns that won’t cause a hull breach. You reach it first and mash in the keycode. The doors pop open at the same time as the airlock.

Four trolls spill out of the airlock, brandishing guns and shouting. They’re all in black sharkskin flight suits and have their helmets on. Their horns are shiny black from their insulated horn stockings. You get off two shots at them before they open fire and you have to duck back into the cockpit.

“Her friends?” Vriska gasps to you, slamming the magazine into her gun.

“Or else they want to cash in on the bounty,” you reply. You lean into the hallway again and open fire. Two of the trolls have disappeared, probably in search of the brig. The other two fire back. A bullet pings off the windshield and you and Vriska both cringe, but that windshield is rated for asteroid strike so it doesn’t even chip.

“They’re not getting back in that airlock,” Vriska says grimly. “Cover me.”

You lean out again. You catch one of the trolls just as he was leaning out as well, and you hear the little yelp he makes as the bullet rips through his sharkskin suit. Vriska vaults out the cockpit doorway, firing as she goes. She reaches the airlock door and fires inside, where both of the trolls have been hiding. You come out of the cockpit too and join her, but all the fun’s already over. The two in trolls are dead, and the airlock is painted olive and mustard.

“Two down!” Vriska says.

“I got one of those,” you reply, going for the ladder that leads down to the brig.

“It wasn’t a killing blow.” She’s right on your heels.

“I softened him up for you.”

She snorts. You drop down to the lower level of the ship and then immediately have to duck into the doorway of the cargo hold as bullets slam into the wall behind the ladder. You can’t peek around the corner, since getting the tips of your horns shot off sounds like a spectacularly painful way to go, but you suspect they’ve already got Merena out of the brig.

Vriska’s still up at the top of the ladder, peering down. “Do we still have any grenades?” she calls to you.

“No grenades in the ship!” you shout back.

She lays flat on her stomach on the floor at the top of the ladder, trying to get a view down the hall. “They won’t breach the hull!”

“The repair bill will come out of your half of the bounty, then.” You check your magazine, just as something to do. You still have plenty of ammo. The trolls seem to be waiting for your move. They can’t get past you as long as Vriska is at the top of the ladder.

“Hell, I could let them shoot you and then I’ll get the whole bounty for myself,” Vriska says.

“Use the money to retire, since you’ll never catch another bounty without me.”

She laughs loudly. “Cover me,” she says, and jumps down the ladder without even touching the rungs.

You lean out and open fire again. Yup, they do have Merena with them, and they’ve given her a gun, which means they are her friends, not rival bounty hunters. They trade fire back with you. There is going to be so much damage to this ship when this is over. Vriska joins you in the cargo hold doorway.

“There’s just three of them,” she says, breathless with adrenaline. “One grenade would take them out.”

“I don’t think we have any.”

“You’re slacking, Pyrope. Am I going to have to take over stocking the weapons cabinet?”

“It’s all yours,” you say. “As long as you don’t use any of those weapons against me.”

“Deal!” she chirps. “On the count of three?”

“One,” you say.

“Two.”

A grenade bounces down the hall, spinning as it rolls. It pings off the ladder.

You both dive into the hallway, hitting the ground and rolling. Bullets splatter all around you as the trolls spray the hall before ducking out of sight. Something hits you hard in the calf, but you’re riding too high on adrenaline to even tell what it is yet.

You make it six feet down the hall before the grenade goes off with enough concussive force to send you to your knees. Vriska hits the ground as well. You grab her arm and drag her against the wall before the trolls can start firing at you again.

Vriska is giggling. She gives you a big, wet kiss on the cheek before she scrambles to her feet and runs into the brig, already firing.

You get up and jump into the doorway. The tiny room is full of gunfire. Merena, braced against the bars of the cage where you’d been keeping her, looks a little woozy, probably from all that healing foam. You doubt Vriska gave her anything to eat, so she’s probably suffering a healing foam hangover right now.

One of the other trolls, teal, is on the ground, bleeding out. The other, brown, is loaded for bear, and is using a half-open cabinet door as cover.

You shoot Merena once in each knee and watch her drop. Vriska opens fire on the cabinet door, splintering it.

Behind her, the teal blood raises his gun. His bullet catches Vriska in the left butt cheek. Yours takes him in the back of the head, but Vriska has been distracted enough that she half-turns. The brown blood lunges forward and wraps one arm around Vriska’s neck. He holds a gun to her head.

“Drop the weapon or I shoot,” says the brown blood.

“That’s a _fucking terrible plan_ ,” says Merena.

You just smile.  


* * *

  
You have four troll corpses locked in the cargo hold. They’ll each fetch a decent bounty as long as you can deliver them before they decompose too much. Merena’s back in the brig, where she will stay.

You and Vriska sprawl in the cockpit, the remains of a protein paste feast around you. You just spent an hour digging bullets out of each other—one from your calf, one from her butt and the last from her chest—and now the cockpit is filled with the cheerful fizz of healing foam.

“I’d rather be shot by a laser rifle,” Vriska groans, curling up on her side on the floor. She’s been whining this past hour, unable to find a comfortable position to lay in.

“It’s much nicer,” you agree. You have your foot propped up on the dashboard. “It leaves a nice, neat hole.”

“You haven’t even apologized yet.” She picks up her spoon from the plate and licks at the protein paste tentatively.

“So sorry for saving your life and stopping the intruders,” you say cheerfully.

She frowns at you. “I killed three quarters of them.”

“Half!” you say. “You didn’t kill the teal blood.”

She scrapes up more protein paste. “I softened him up for you.”

“Next time I’ll shoot you with a laser rifle instead.”

“Now that would be flirting.”

You nod decisively. “It would.”

She flings the spoon at you. Protein paste splatters across the dashboard. “No flirting! It’s against the rules, for whatever reason.”

“I can’t work with you if you’re going to, I don’t know, put a price on my head to spice up our relationship.”

“Pshh.” She starts to roll on her back, then stops, flinching. “The job comes first.”

“The job comes first,” you agree solemnly, as if you’re giving a toast.

“Relationships come second,” she continues.

“Absolutely.”

“If you shoot me again, I’m going to break both your legs.”

You throw the spoon back at her. “You’ll have to catch me first.”


End file.
